BusyConf's First High School Intern: Daniel Ackerman

by Daniel Ackerman on Jun 7, 2013

Hello, my name is Daniel Ackerman.

I just graduated from Loudoun Valley High School and will attend Christopher
Newport University next year to study computer science. Before I could even
read, I showed a great interest in computers when I got a Nintendo 64 at age
four. When I was nine, I decided to build my own desktop computer. Then, when
I turned 13, I got a PSP and proceeded to hack it. The following year I became
a well-known iTouch and iPhone jail breaker at my intermediate school. But it
was not until I took a basic computer science course my junior year in high
school that I had any programming experience. The first quarter was very hard
for me; and, while normally I was not the academic student who persevered, I
suddenly found myself spending every night at home hacking away on different
pieces of code. Not only did this new found aspiration for computer science
cause my grades in that class to improve, but it also helped to improve my
grades in all of my other classes as well. I was definitely going to sign up
for AP computer science the next year.

My senior year was very exciting for me. The preceding summer I spent hours
each day programming, and I solved many mathematical problems with computer
science on Project Euler. I also had a mentor in the computer science field
that helped me when I needed it. As most of my fellow classmates lost interest
in their classes and turned towards college, I finally focused on
school. Realizing that calculus could help me further my computer science
endeavors, I began teaching it to myself. For once, all of my math classes
became a breeze. I began to make nearly straight A’s, something I had not
achieved for years. I helped out the first year computer science students,
serving as a teacher assistant for a teacher I will never forget. That
Christmas, instead of asking for some gadget or game, I asked for computer
science and math textbooks: scala, calculus, game physics, functional
programming. In the last few months I wrote a derivative, integration, and
graphing program for a physics project and learned dynamic programming. But as
my year began to come to a close, I was told of an internship opportunity at a
company called BusyConf.

While I had recently acquired a job to save some money for college, the
interview and pre-interview email processes for BusyConf were very
nerve-wracking for me. Even being a coached varsity debater, I was really
nervous speaking in front of Ryan. I knew from the moment I googled his name
that I had found someone who not only knew programming and business inside and
out, but someone who could actually teach me and help me turn my passion and
still beginner’s knowledge of computer science into a real craft. Over the
course of a month, Ryan and I emailed each other back and forth as a sort of
pre-interview. I remember quite a few days where I kept my phone close,
waiting for some response, only to jump back into learning the new language
Ruby I heard about from Ryan. At the interview I was extremely nervous–I was
actually meeting Ryan in person!

Getting picked for the internship was simply amazing. The night I got the
email I was ecstatic. However, my first day was very different from my
expectations. Ryan introduced me to the challenging process of picking out the
stickers for the cover of a MacBook. When he took me and his friend (Chris Mar) out to
lunch, we had a funny conversation about the crazy interview questions
software companies can ask applicants. Later that day I was shown how
to run a live version of the BusyConf server on the MacBook and how to use
git & hub to pull repositories from GitHub. Lastly, I was given a rundown of
the Mac operating system. But it was the smaller personal gestures that made
me feel truly welcome.

At BusyConf this summer, I expect to be greatly challenged. I have already
been challenged: I had this quirk where I press the caps lock key instead of
the shift key to capitalize, and Ryan has “helped me” by taking it away on the
Mac…but I know this is for good. I expect that if I put in 100%, I can achieve
a level of computer science that I am only now beginning to see as
possible. Last summer I grew tremendously, simply by pushing myself. But I
lacked a dedicated teacher, formal instruction, and clear goals. This summer,
I have all of those, in addition to a mindset on becoming an amazing
programmer.